Saturday, 31 December 2011

Oh, old oneold Pore,forgotten dog, smallanimal that once existedthese sixty oddyears ago or more.There was once a photo of you,I remember it only dimly,you had a name,your name was not Pore, I cannot recall what your veritable name wasany more, it was solong ago. Tugs at my heart now I did notcare for you more,little Pore, smallpetshop mongrel merely existingso obscurelyand briefly, harming none, ignored by alland got rid of so soonafter you came, relegatedto what sad endI cannot think of nowif I ever did know. All I know is that you are gone. Your photo is gone.The vague memory I have of youwill soon be gone also,those will have been the last tracesof you leftin the world, Pore.I wish I had paid more attentionto you when the chance was there.For you, if by someweird chanceyou are aware of them,wherever you are, these memoriesI am seekingmust represent a sadness. Or then again maybe not,for you were so undemanding alwaysin your brief timeunder the weak occluded1940s sun. You asked so littleand received perhaps even less than that.It will seem just as well to you, it may be, to be forgotten, even, perhaps,a relief. Your imagedwindling noweven as I write,so dimly limned,so small,so unremarkable,so besetif not by abusethen by neglect,that surely, yes,that's the part I do not forget, the neglect, the remorse,the thought.I thinkbut am not surethat in the lost photograph you were looking up anxiouslyat the cameracradled in a dirty blanketinsidea cardboard box.

Man playing with dog: photo by Roger Rössing, between 29 August 1948 and 15 September 1948 (Deutsche Fotothek)

Friday, 30 December 2011

Animals simply do NOT "look back", in the human sense, as remorse, regret, nostalgia, etc. They are far too sensible for that. Their demonstration of some semblances of short term memory, e.g. the serial position effect, which privileges recency over anciency, is a strictly practical function. There's a bit of hippocampus activity at work there... but only the tiniest bit. In the related area of spatial memory, the scatter-hoarder creatures are thought to have some ability to relocate their scatter hoards. But this function is limited at best, as anybody who has closely observed the behaviour of squirrels would know. We had a neighbour who for many years sat in his yard feeding peanuts to the squirrels. The squirrels accepted these gifts and immediately busied themselves with burying them. But over the years, the ground became an immense cache of buried peanuts, the location of which had obviously been forgot by the squirrels who had so busily buried them. It was almost funny to watch the little guys bustling about, scrabbling at the ground in one spot after another. It became obvious that their method was to scatter their hoard so generally that, by sheer force of arithmetical chance, sooner or later they could not help but accidentally discover an ancient mouldering peanut. Clearly they had no memory whatsoever of exactly where they had put anything. The same phenomenon occurs in elderly humans.

Monsanto phosphorus plant, Soda Springs, Caribou County, southeast Idaho. This phosphate ore-processing plant was originally constructed by the Morrison-Knudsen Company in 1950, and production started in 1952. As of 2011, P4 Production LLC (Monsanto’s wholly owned subsidiary) owns the phosphate mining and processing facilities. The phosphate ore processed at Soda Springs comes from nearby (10–20 miles away) phosphate deposits laid down in Permian-era oceans ca. 250 million years ago. In the plant’s furnaces elemental phosphorus is refined from phosphate ore. Phosphorus is used as an important ingredient of Roundup brand herbicides and for some other products: photo by akasped, 10 September 2010

II...Tree House

Greece's wealth on the bough: photo by Vassilis Zambaras, 2007

“Houses, you know, grow stubborn easily, when you strip them bare.”

-- George Seferis, from Thrush

Not your usual idea

Of a child’s elevated playhouseFull of youthful abandon,

But this

Abandoned, low-lying roofless

Shell of decaying stone walls

Inhabited by stubborn runaway

Brambles and wild olive trees

Rooted firmly to the earth.

The "face" of an ancient olive tree: photo by Vassilis Zambaras, 2007

“If you haven’t built a house, dug a well, and married off a son or daughter, you haven’t lived.” -- Greek proverbAs part of her dowry, Eleni was given about a hundred olive trees in a grove in the middle of nowhere about 9 kilometers due west of Meligalas; the only way you could get there in 1981 was to park your car a kilometer away and go on foot uphill for about 20 minutes. Every winter, my mother-in-law and her late husband would walk down from Revmatia to this olive grove during olive harvesting time (a two-and-a-half- hour walk) with a donkey ladened with provisions, all six children, the goats and anywhere from 15 to 20 sheep. Once there, they would stay in a tiny 3x3 sq.m stone hut for as long as it took them to harvest the olives-- usually a week, but longer if it was a good year. In 1981, Eleni and I decided to tear down the hut, together with the nearby sheep enclosure and use the stones to have a new house built in the grove, but first we had to find enough cornerstones for its construction; using our Fiat 127, we immediately set out rummaging through the countless heaps of dumped stones and piles of rubble scattered all over Messenias to find the pieces we needed.For this small 4 x 6 sq.m house, we only required about 50 cornerstones and fortunately for us but not for traditional Greek village architecture, at this time people were still demolishing traditional stone houses in fits of modernist frenzy and building new monstrosities out of reinforced concrete and brick and calling it “progress,” so it was fairly easy finding cornerstones. And that’s just what Eleni and I did in the ten years between the building of the little house in the grove and the construction in 1991 of the much, much larger two-storey stone residence our family now lives in. By then we had amassed approximately 1,200 cornerstones—more than enough for the house and the stone wall in front—and were known throughout Upper Messenias as that “somewhat batty couple in a battered Fiat 127 who were gathering, of all things, cornerstones.” [NB: It might interest readers to know that cornerstones from old demolished houses are now selling at 30 € a piece and up.]But back to the grove. During Fall, Winter and Spring and when the two children were still too young for school, we would leave Meligalas every other Friday night after I had finished with my English lessons, drive the car (filled with enough food and other provisions to last us until Monday morning) to where the dirt road morphed into a rut, and then haul the kids and provisions up to the house—no electricity, no phone, no running water, no other people, owls hooting, jackals crying at night, millions of stars—for a weekend in Paradise. As strange as it might seem, when we came back down to idyllic Meligalas on Monday, it felt as if we were returning to Hell aka Civilization. Vassilis Zambaras: from One Down (Twice), Two to Go, from Vazambam, Saturday 11 July 2011

Bird Hunters sign, outside Monsanto phosphorus plant, Soda Springs, Caribou County, southeast Idaho. This phosphate ore-processing plant was originally constructed by the Morrison-Knudsen Company in 1950, and production started in 1952. As of 2011, P4 Production LLC (Monsanto’s wholly owned subsidiary) owns the phosphate mining and processing facilities. The phosphate ore processed at Soda Springs comes from nearby (10–20 miles away) phosphate deposits laid down in Permian-era oceans ca. 250 million years ago. In the plant’s furnaces elemental phosphorus is refined from phosphate ore. Phosphorus is used as an important ingredient of Roundup brand herbicides and for some other products: photo by akasped, 10 September 2010

That old Talk about the Gods, which is called mythology, is confused in many ways, partly because all language is confused, partly because it is a layer of many languages. When the talkers no longer used the beast as an idol, they used it as a symbol, in short a word; when they no longer slew the real christ at Easter, they named the sun at Easter, Christ. Their language is tangled and twisted beyond our power wholly to unravel, because it was beyond their power; because it began as a tangle, when man's mind was still a blur, and he saw men as trees walking, and trees as men standing still.

How hard the old cloistered scholarship, to which the Nobels of a bygone age gave their endowments, has toiled to understand the word glaukopis, given to the goddess Athene. Did it mean blue-eyed, or gray-eyed, or by the aid of Sanskrit merely glare-eyed? And all the time they had not only the word glaux staring them in the face, as the Athenian name for owl, but they had the owl itself cut at the foot of every statue of Athene, and stamped on every coin of Athens, to tell them that she was the owl-eyed goddess, the lightning that blinks like an owl. For what is characteristic of the owl's eyes is not that they glare, but that they suddenly leave off glaring, like lighthouses whose light is shut off. We may see the shutter of the lightning in that mask that overhangs Athene's brow, and hear its click in the word glaukos. And the leafage of the olive, whose writhen trunk bears, as it were, the lightning's brand, does not glare, but glitters, the pale under face of the leaves alternating with the dark upper face, and so the olive is Athene's tree, and is called glaukos. Why need we carry owls to Oxford?-- Allen Upward:from The New Word (London, 1908)

Tuesday, 27 December 2011

Had great trees great memoriesWould that lifeform which has looked impassively down upon centuries of useRecollect the gold and silver pilfered from the AndesBy vast slave armies to finance the high tables of the New World?

The cutting edge of history is once again the blade that slicesThe tall cold man in the dark coat out of the cameraphone picture

Monday, 26 December 2011

Charlie Chaplin stands on Douglas Fairbanks' shoulders during a Wall Street rally, 1918: photographer unknown, for The New York Times; image by Mr Gustafson, 21 October 2007

The dozens and scores of pinnacles that have pierced the skies over Manhattan in the last dozen years, towers for doing business in and towers for living in, are the permanent notation of a great surge of prosperity. The tide itself once so often recedes. The towers are there to testify to the vast energy that threw them upwards and that is certain to reassert itself after the necessary retirement... For a while the receding tide leaves these ambitious monuments high and dry. Then the waves begin to lap forward again...

The giant Norway spruce from Podunk, its lower branches bound, this morning was reared into place at Rockefeller Center. I thought I saw a cold blue dusty light sough in its boughs the way other years the wind thrashing at the giant ornaments recalled other years and Christmas trees more homey. Each December! I always think I hate “the over-commercialized event” and then bells ring, or tiny light bulbs wink above the entrance to Bonwit Teller or Katherine going on five wants to look at all the empty sample gift-wrapped boxes up Fifth Avenue in swank shops and how can I help falling in love? A calm secret exultation of the spirit that tastes like Sealtest eggnog, made from milk solids, Vanillin, artificial rum flavoring; a milky impulse to kiss and be friends It’s like what George and I were talking about, the East West Coast divide: Californians need to do a thing to enjoy it. A smile in the street may be loads! you don’t have to undress everybody. ..................................“You didn’t visit the Alps?” ..................................“No, but I saw from the train they were black ..................................and streaked with snow.” Having and giving but also catching glimpses hints that are revelations: to have been so happy is a promise and if it isn’t kept that doesn’t matter. It may snow falling softly on lashes of eyes you love and a cold cheek grow warm next to your own in hushed dark familial December.

JamesSchuyler: December, from May 24th or So, 1966

Ice skating in Rockefeller Center, New York, New York: photo by John Collier, December 1941

Photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

Saturday, 24 December 2011

So then he wandered out into the street and began to testify Something about life being a long journey of the soulAn endless voyaging turning into a voyaging with an endOne knows how but one does not know whenNo one yet knows when as the traffic bore down on him As the traffic bore down on him my mind drifted in the wildernessOr was it that my mind having been adrift all alongI’ve just grown to regard the wilderness as my resting or laughing placeHe cried but those were not yet his last words As the traffic parted around him as around one charmed

Delmore Schwartz: The Winter Twilight, Glowing Black and GoldThat time of year you may in me beholdWhen Christmas trees are blazing on the walk,Raging amid stale snow against the coldAnd low sky's bundled wash, senseless as chalk.Hissing and ravenous the brilliant plant,Rising like eagerness, a rushing pyre(As when the tutti bursts forth, and the chantSoars up -- hurrahing! -- from the Easter choir).

But this is only true at four o'clock,At noon the fifth year is once more abused,I bring a distant girl apples and cake,Pictures, secrets, lastly my swollen heart,Now boxed and tied by what I know of art-- But as before accepted and refused.

Delmore Schwartz: The Winter Twilight, Glowing Black and Gold, from Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems, 1950

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 73: That time of yeeare thou maiſt in me behold

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 73 (1609 quarto, facsimile)

That time of yeeare thou maiſt in me behold, When yellow leaues, or none, or fewe doe hange Vpon thoſe boughes which ſhake againſt the could, Bare rn'wd quiers,where late the ſweet birds ſang. In me thou ſeeſt the twi-light of ſuch day, As after Sun-ſet fadeth in the Weſt, Which by and by blacke night doth take away, Deaths ſecond ſelfe that ſeals vp all in reſt. In me thou ſeeſt the glowing of ſuch fire, That on the aſhes of his youth doth lye, As the death bed, whereon it muſt expire, Conſum'd with that which it was nurriſht by. This thou perceu'ſt, which makes thy loue more ſtrong, To loue that well, which thou muſt leaue ere long.

William Shakespeare: Sonnet 73: That time of yeeare thou maiſt in me behold, from 1609 Quarto

Thursday, 22 December 2011

Unemployed workers in front of shack with Christmas tree, East 12th Street, New York, New York: photo by Russell Lee, January 1938(Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Shoppers rush past frozen images unseen,In bright synthetics Sierra skiers skiThrough snowdead woods on blurred storewindow TV.In the forest it is cold. How can it beColder in the cities? Street people crouched Under Amoeba’s protective arcade mouthSuch big round starving O’s: oxygen balloonsLifting off to perfect freedom, no strings --A pity they can’t float off in them.Peace, brother. I can spare the buck or pass it. Just breathing commits one to everything --To life -- which can’t be purchased on this streetWhere ravenous as sheer presence Christmas lightsUp human appetites for guilty pleasures.